In the fall of 2020, as many young families found themselves reevaluating their dwellings, designer Louisa Pierce, her husband, writer-musician Austin Scaggs, and their children, Levon, now 12 years old, and Poet, 9, hopped into an RV without the faintest idea where they were heading. They had sold the Nashville house they called home for the past decade, a place Pierce had designed from the ground up and which became the catalyst for the sought-after AD100 practice she cofounded with close friend Emily Ward. The family had decamped to Whidbey Island early on in the pandemic, and even bought land there to build what they imagined would be their dream home before having a reckoning of sorts and scratching that plan. They tried out Florida for a while, and crossed it off their list. At the persuasion of Ward and Pierce’s two sisters, who all live in Los Angeles, they set off in that direction, but a month or two in, they determined it wasn’t a fit either. “We were nomads,” Pierce explains.
Meanwhile, Pierce’s parents had just moved back to Birmingham, and marveled at how much it had changed for the better. Pierce had grown up there but hadn’t returned since she was 18. Now, there was a thriving culinary scene, a creative community, abundant golf courses for Scaggs, and a poetic beauty to feed Pierce’s eye. “So we said, let’s give it a shot.” She flew down with the kids, and Scaggs drove their car. “It felt chaotic and scary, but looking back we were definitely alive at that moment.” Upon arrival, she happily reports, “all four of us were like, this feels right.”
The couple gave their real estate agent a list of must-haves and searched unsuccessfully, until one day while taking a walk, they saw a sign for an open house and decided to check it out. The Tudor-style home was perched on a bluff overlooking downtown in a neighborhood filled with stately properties dating to the 1920s. Its exterior dripped in ivy, and an antique fountain in the courtyard held undeniable charm. “Both of us immediately looked at each other like, ‘This is it. This is the house,’ ” Pierce recalls. In a funny twist of fate, “it was everything we said we didn’t want,” she notes with amusement. “But I was like, I can fix all this. It’s really the feel of a house that makes it yours,” she asserts. They put in an offer that day.